This week, in our least well prepared show ever, we return with another unhealthy dose of increasingly MMO-less news and ramblings about stuff.

The twitter question was "This week saw us literally paralysed by LotRO's Dread System, which was quite irritating! What MMO mechanic annoys you the most?" which gave us a distinct lack of comedy answers, but so many sensible ones we decided to go with it for the topic as well.

'A thank you & a gripe' by AndrewSubmitted on 2009-06-19 12:54:45 CSTThanks for revisiting my Guild Wars comment from last week. I appreciate the offer to try it out with you guys, but timing-wise I'm in EST so I'm not sure that you playtimes coincide with when I could be online. Ah well. There is Guild Wars 2 coming, which looks enticing so long as they don't go fully instanced.... I'd love a mix of technology and high fantasy.

Regarding the Twitter question from last week... I'm not a Twit, so never see the questions until I hear them on your show, but I was sad to hear that no one mentioned my least favorite mechanic in MMOs: basing progress on a task (skill training/crafting/etc.) on real time. EVE is a huge culprit for this, but recently EQ2 introduced a similar mechanic for some skill training. To me there is nothing more frustrating than having to queue up something I'd like to accomplish and then being forced to wait 30 minutes/4 hours/4 days/etc for the bloody task to complete. Game progress should NEVER be tied to elapsed real world time, it's just ridiculous.

'LFP!' by ZosoSubmitted on 2009-06-19 15:38:04 CSTCombining the "Find Van Hemlock a Wife" and "What is an MMO" thread... Would the panel say online dating sites count as MMOs? How about if they added achievements? Or would it be a better idea to take an existing MMO, and add a "Looking for Partner" option to the usual "Looking for Group" interface?

'Andrew's Gripe' by KirithKodachiSubmitted on 2009-06-24 12:38:42 CSTI completely disagree, I love real time mechanics and hate mechanics that force me to be in game to improve as I don't have enough time to do so. I'd never hit a level cap in a game like CoH or WoW.

On another note, I wrote this reply to the complaints about travel times from this episode. Sorry I didn't get it in before you recorded the #57 show. Sigh.